NASA Sends New Year’s Greeting to NYC

NASA astronauts will help ring in 2014 by sending greetings from space and from Earth to the crowd gathered in New York's Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Astronaut Mike Massimino will participate in the New Year’s Eve Countdown event on Tuesday evening, Dec. 31. He also will introduce a video greeting from Expedition 36 flight engineer Karen Nyberg, who returned from the International Space Station in November, and from three of the astronauts currently on board the space station: NASA's Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins, and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The New Year’s countdown will be shown from 6 p.m. to 12:15 a.m. EST on the Toshiba Vision screen atop One Times Square, right below the New Year countdown ball. Eddie Temistokle, senior manager of corporate communications and corporate social responsibility for Toshiba America Inc., will welcome Massimino to the stage at 9:47 p.m.

Mastracchio, Hopkins and Wakata are part of a six-member crew currently on the orbiting laboratory, along with Oleg Kotov, Mikhail Tyurin and Sergey Ryazanski of the Russian Federal Space Agency.

Prominently positioned below the world-famous Times Square New Year's Eve Ball, the dual LED screens will allow revelers in Times Square to see this special greeting from space.

Several NASA events have been broadcast in Times Square, including the Curiosity rover landing on Mars, which drew thousands of viewers, and the launches of two other spacecraft.